


In Our Spaceship After the War

by nicasio_silang



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, F/M, Paragon Shepard (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 07:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17279543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: Shepard doesn't wish that she were dead, she just isn't sure she should have survived. Garrus brought snacks.





	In Our Spaceship After the War

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a gift for Ian, and for the paragon Shepard who chooses Destroy, whom I will never bring myself to play.

Shepard once overheard a tourist from Earth, some civilian taking a miserable pit stop at Omega on their way to Illium, loudly insisting that what spacers call “rats” were not “actual rats”. 

“It’s got eight legs, for crying out loud! And what are those, are those supposed to be eyes? For shit’s sake. I’m from Milwaukee, okay, I know from rats and those are a goddamn nightmare is what those are.”

Unfortunately for anyone within earshot, he had similar opinions regarding several sentient species. Shepard wasn’t exactly keeping track of the guy, but she’d guess he didn’t make it to asari space. Aria had a thing about xenophobes. That was years ago now, maybe five years ago and another life entirely. Only the culled population and pitted walls of Omega now, and the craters of the North American midwest. The rats probably made it out, though. That’s how these things tend to go. 

In any case, the rats on the refitted comm buoy that Shepard’s living in are the usual, eight-legged kind that had eaten a season’s worth of stores on Mindoir when she was thirteen years old, and later had shared a ten-berth cabin with her and twenty-five other orphans in the year between the end of her childhood and the beginning of her Alliance career. The low-slung, wall-climbing, levo-protein-based animals that duct rats were named for, indigenous to seemingly every maintenance shaft in the galaxy. In a place like Omega, there was enough space for them to have their own niche, stay mostly unobtrusive. But the buoy is about a quarter of the size of the SR1, and less than half that area is open and habitable. Close quarters, even if there’s only one of her and half a dozen of them. Still, she would have gladly left them be if _someone_ hadn’t started gnawing apart the wiring for the environmental controls. The lights are going on and off. Mostly off.

Shepard doesn’t like the dark. It’s never gotten in her way, there are a lot of things she doesn’t like that she’s charged through nonetheless, but it’s a preference, it’s the reason she’d maintained an unreasonably large, well-lit fish tank to house two eels and a sunfish, and out here there’s nobody to rib her for wanting to maintain creature comforts. Out here, 5 million kilometers from the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt, about 7.4 billion klicks from Earth, it’s just her and the rats. Shepard’s on her belly, arms and face down in the guts of the environmentals, omni-tool flickering like a candle.

“I’m not angry,” she says. Her voice rattles around through the floor grating. “You’d know if I was angry. But when you need resources, I need you to tell me about it, and then I can allocate. We can’t afford this sort of haphazard, everyone for themselves crap. We’re not seeing a resupply for a long time. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

Of course, because the universe loves to undercut her, that’s when the proximity alert goes off. 

“We’re going to circle back to this,” she tells the space between the floor and the bulkhead. 

The alert solves the lighting problem for the time being, because the alert triggers the exterior nimbus lights, which leak through the windows and run off a separate energy source. Good thing, too, that the designers thought to build them that way in the retrofit and sealed their power core off from the main grid, so that they stayed untouched by any internal issues like unexpected life support strains, random interstellar energy wave collisions, or curious rodents. Hell or high water, the outer lights came on. Wouldn’t be much of a lighthouse otherwise.

Proximity means 750,000 kilometers away. Average of about two hours out. Sensors say this one will make it in half that time, even though it’s approaching while decelerating. It’s a tiny little thing, on the small end of a corvette, heading from in-system out into the wide open dark. It should be gaining speed, not losing it, if the crew doesn’t want to spend the rest of their lives drifting somewhere between here and the Arcturus Stream. Shepard shoots a message their way to that effect. 

The lighthouse shouts itself out in every direction in a handful of light and radio frequencies. Shepard keeps an eye on the signal strength, tweaks it towards optimal. From here to the next buoy, deep in the empty gap between systems, it’s two light years. A thread in the dark, lucky thirteen of them strung along it, lighting the way to Benning. The approaching ship replies in audio. 

“This is PFS Indra requesting permission to dock. You know, if you’re not too busy.”

“Garrus?”

“Yes,” he drags it out for a few syllables. “Why, were you expecting some other turian?”

There’s a long moment of static while she finds something to say. Shepard finds herself grateful for the lack of a video link. She drags a hand through her hair and gets a finger caught.

“You’re headed the wrong way for the Palaven route,” she says, finally, then the long silence is on his end. The monitor shows the distance between them narrowing. 

“If you don’t want company, I’ll turn around. It’s been a long time, and I should have reached out sooner. That’s on me. But you should know…” She waits, feels a breath get caught between her ribs. “I brought snacks.”

She loosens at the shoulders, the fists. She lets him hear her laugh. 

“Well in that case, permission granted. Can your little tin can there hook to a docking tube?”

“Not sure. I was planning on coming in at ramming speed, just make this a permanent structural addition.”

“I’m extending the docking tube.”

Garrus sighs, double-toned, sounding like he’s leaning into the pickups to make sure it comes through. 

“If you must.”

Shepard extends the docking tube. Shepard replaces the floor grating. Shepard stacks all the datapads that are strewn around the place into a pile on a shelf, and then into two shorter, less precarious piles, and then takes one off the top and arranges it casually on her work desk. Shepard sniffs the shirt she’s wearing, but does nothing about what it smells like. She washes her face. She picks up the model geth cruiser from its spot on the sill of the port window and soothes a fingertip along it, then puts it back down. Then picks it up and hides it behind one of the stacks of datapads. She checks the monitor. Garrus is still forty-five minutes out. Shepard pinches the bridge of her nose. She tears the grates back up and gets back to work on the wiring damage.

Eventually there’s the sound of the locks cycling. It’s very likely actually Garrus and only Garrus, but Shepard still leaves the grate open as a place of immediate visual interest for anyone stepping through the door, and takes up a position to the left of the entrance. Just standing, though. Holding a spanner because she might need a spanner, not because she might need a weapon. And in any case Garrus, he’s no fool. He comes in slowly, wide to the right, with his hands high. He’s in light armor, which she feels somewhat relieved by. Seeing him in civvies would have been one oddity too many. He does a full spin, slow, that gives her time to see that he’s unarmed, and he turns it into an almost-believable survey of the lighthouse interior. Such as it is.

“Wow, Shepard, I um. Love what you’ve done with the place?”

“I’ve had worse. Is that a picnic basket?”

“You’ve also had much better.” She lets that slide. He waggles the basket in the air. “Sure looks like one, doesn’t it.”

“Did you come all the way out here to have a picnic with me?”

“Well. Yeah. What else are friends for?” 

In this, her new context, Shepard finds she isn’t entirely sure. But she takes the basket from him. Garrus has found something to lean casually against: the thick pillar that runs through center of the buoy’s habitable space. The hole in the ring of her life. He fits himself against it and it’s just the same, the way he stands, the glacier-blue sparks of his eyes, his long fingers laced, his head tilted just so to tell her that he sees her, knows her. Shepard backs away. She places the basket on her desk to rummage around in it. A pile of MREs, charmingly tied up in red ribbons. 

“Oh. That’s really…uh. I really appreciate that you…um.”

“Yay of little faith,” he says, pushing himself upright and over to her, half between her and the desk, reaching for the basket. She says it’s ye, but it gets lost in the air between them. He smells like the inside of a shuttle, and like himself. Shepard steps back. Garrus looks at his own hand that had brushed against her hip. His mandibles twitch, but just once, then he’s back to the picnic basket, reaching below the shrink-wrapped packages and pulling out a clear plastic bag stuffed with a rainbow of candies. “Sugar: dextro- and levo-safe, and currently the only Earth export that doesn’t taste like boiled cement.”

She’s got her hand in the bag in a second, then something orange on her tongue. “My hero,” she says. 

“Well, when I heard you were alone out here-“

“I’m not alone. There’s rats.”

“Like I said, alone. I figured you might need some home cooking. Or something like it.”

“Thank you,” she says, and knows she means it because her feet stay planted and she looks him in the eyes for a moment while she says it. “I’m fine out here, I really am. But thank you.”

“Shepard.” He reaches out for her again and she stands very still, lets him hook a talon into the pocket of her hoodie and pull just enough so that she feels him as a small gravity. “Nobody in the galaxy is fine right now. And that’s not on you, I just mean that you don’t need to exile yourself just to feel what you’re feeling.”

“I’m not in exile,” is the argument she chooses to go with. Garrus hmm’s, a noise that makes his mandibles clatter against his teeth. “Someone needs to crew these while all the VIs are fried. It’s just a posting.”

“That you requested.” 

Shepard shrugs with her shoulders. She looks at the pebbled skin of his neck, where his pulse is beating, bird-fast and steady. 

“I don’t have a lot of peacetime skills,” she says. “But I can crew a giant light switch.”

“I get that. I think I get that. Can I..?” Slow and obvious, he brings his other hand to her shoulder. The thick pad of his thumb soothes over her collarbone through the fabric of her clothing. Shepard is forgetting to take every other breath. “I’m not going to make you come back. I won’t even ask.”

The candy in her mouth feels enormous. A stone on her tongue. She has to talk around it, barely audible. Garrus has sat on the lip of her desk, his shoulders and the halo of his carapace cupping her into his space. His crest is backlit by the lighthouse exteriors, and she can’t see his eyes, so she closes hers. 

“I did something horrible,” she says. Her voice is all wind. “I could have said no, but I was so tired. I was so tired.”

“You ended it.” He sounds very close. If she tilts her head, their brows will meet. “I should have been there.”

“I did something horrible,” she says again, like it’s all she can say. 

After a while, she knows he’s not going to tell her she’s wrong. His big, cool hand on her shoulder and her neck. His thumb moving, moving, the same as he’s always touched her, without expectation or demand, without pretending she could be anyone other than herself. 

“I did something horrible,” she says. She leans in to meet him, and he’s there. 

Then everything goes dark.

“Um.”

Long enough after a docking, the external lights switch off, no longer concerned with guiding a ship in or out. The internal lights fail to come back on. She’d been hoping that Garrus somehow wouldn’t notice.

“Should I be worried about this, Shepard?”

“No.”

“Right. Okay. I am a little worried, though.”

“I mentioned the rats, right?”

“How many rats are we talking about?”

“Not sure,” she says. “But we’re in negotiations.”

He shifts, the break in the plates of his face pressing a crease into the skin of her forehead. She used to get a little red line that stayed there for hours.

“You don’t want me to…you know. Shoot them?”

“No.”

“It’s really no trouble.”

“No. We’re going to make it work. I am.” He hums at her, backing her decision. She couldn’t have made another choice. She’ll live in the dark if she has to.


End file.
